[0:02]Kim Jong Un is threatening the world with endless missile tests. You might be thinking, what's new? We're used to North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un being presented either as a super villain or laughed off in dictator jokes. But now some North Korea watchers are sounding the alarm, saying Kim might actually want a war. How big? When? Don't know. Kim seems to be sick of trying to make peace, and things are working out in his favor. These days Kim is very emboldened. That's a threat, especially for South Korea, which is backed by the US. So is the frozen conflict between North Korea and South Korea heating back up, and is Kim more dangerous than ever?
[0:59]These days, Kim Jong Un seems to be pretty into maps, and when dictators start focusing a lot on borders, that's always a bit worrying. Here he is inspecting a model of the South Korean capital Seoul, and warning that his country is ready to completely annihilate his neighbor to the south if provoked. Whatever that means. And this is the border he particularly has his eye on, the disputed maritime border between North and South Korea, known as the Northern Limit Line or NLL. Instead of just extending the land border out into the sea, look at how the boundary is drawn here, curving up over these islands. They've remained under de facto South Korean control, but North Korea claims these waters. Which is why it's not surprising that they don't appreciate US and South Korean Navy drills here. In 2010, North Korea attacked one of the islands, killing several people there. Now North Korea has repeatedly fired artillery into the waters around the islands as a threat. North Korea has been unhappy about this border for decades. Now Kim seems done with tolerating it. He called it illegal. It seems to me he wants that clash for some reason. He wants that to happen, and he's preparing for it. This is Robert Carlin. He's been working on North Korea for over 50 years and has been there at least 30 times, including as a US intelligence officer. Carlin thinks Kim Jong Un's talk of illegal borders might only be the first step to wider military action. Another worrying development: Kim recently declared that South Korea is now the North's principal enemy.
[2:54]Before, peaceful reunification was the official goal. Kim was effectively saying South Korea is no longer part of the traditional core of the Korean people.
[3:09]And Kim has the military might to back up his rhetoric. He has nuclear weapons. And he's in charge of one of the largest armies in the world. The tensions between the two sides extend from the sea over onto the land into the DMZ. It's the most militarized demilitarized zone in the world. And it's where the war between North and South Korea has been frozen for 70 years. And where the Korean peninsula is basically still split along Cold War lines. How did we get here? At the end of World War II, the Korean peninsula was liberated from Japanese occupation.
[3:56]The winners of the war, the Soviet Union and the United States, decided that they would each occupy half of the peninsula. They agreed on this latitude as the dividing line. In 1950, North Korean troops invaded the South, and the South pushed back. It was a brutal war. At least 2 and a half million people were killed. The North was backed by the Soviet Union and later also by China, both communist states. The South was backed by UN troops led by the US. And you'll see the Cold War superpowers never really went away. In 1953, an armistice agreement was signed, freezing the front line of the war roughly back along the same line again. It ended the fighting and created the buffer zone we already saw, the DMZ. But it left many things unresolved. Like that maritime border. That wasn't in the agreement. The UN, led by the US, drew that later without actually asking North Korea's permission. And it wasn't a peace treaty, so the war between North and South Korea never officially ended.
[5:11]The same family that launched the war is still in charge now. The Kim family is currently the only communist dynasty. Kim Jong Un rules just like his father and grandfather before him, with a totalitarian cult of personality and an iron fist, using intimidation and violence. North Koreans don't have access to the outside world. Leaving the country is illegal without permission. And then came the pandemic. North Korea had some of the strictest border controls in the world. And Kim started building hundreds of kilometers of fencing and walls along North Korea's border with Russia and China. Like here, satellite images show that a double fence pops up after the pandemic shutdown. North Korea even introduced a shoot to kill order along the Chinese border. So Kim has pretty much sealed off his country and locked in his people, but he's open for business with his authoritarian neighbors. North Korea shares a 1,400 km long border with China. Without its northern neighbor, the country wouldn't survive. Almost all of its very limited trade happens with China. Which brings us to Rason, a North Korean region right on the border with both China and Russia. It's a special economic zone, which means this is where the communist country has been letting a bit of capitalism happen since the 1990s. Now something new is happening here. Just look at how close North Korea's Tumangang station and Russia's Khasan station are. This satellite image from October 2023, analyzed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, shows an unprecedented number of rail cars at the North Korean train station. Some of these rail cars seem to end up in Russia. The crates are covered, so no one really knows what's inside. But the CSIS experts say it's likely North Korean munitions for Russia, which is two years into its full-scale war against Ukraine. Ukraine says it has found North Korean artillery shells and missiles on the battlefield. The UN has confirmed the use of missiles. North Korea and Russia deny the claims.
[7:39]What's Kim Jong Un getting out of it? Well, reportedly a lot of money. And Putin may be giving Kim oil and raw materials and parts to make more weapons, potentially including banned missile technology. Some of this stuff has been hard for Kim to come by so far. North Korea is under international sanctions for building and testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Oil deliveries, for example, violate those sanctions. We will prioritize the North Korea-Russia relationship and put it as the number one priority of our foreign policy from now on. These days Kim is very emboldened. Jenny Town is the director of a program devoted to North Korea analysis at the Stimson Center think tank. She's been working on North Korea for almost 20 years. This is a big win for Kim Jong Un. He bet on Putin, he bet on the war, and so far that bet now, um, is paying off for him. This Russian-made luxury limousine is an example of that. It was a fancy gift from Putin to Kim on his recent trip to Russia. Luxury items are also sanctioned. So this gift is Putin showing how little he cares about all that, because both Kim and Putin are under sanctions. Cheers to a growing friendship. The two also share a passion for showing off their weapons. And it's more than just showing off. Now North Korea's getting field experience for their missiles. There's been evidence of them in the Ukrainian battlefields, and if they improve the quality of, could be a cheap choice for others in the future. What this means, improved North Korean weapons on the illegal market. Potential buyers include Syria and Iran.
[9:41]On his trip to Russia, Kim Jong Un also toured a spaceport in the far east of the country. South Korean intelligence has said it probably was Russian help that enabled North Korea to launch its first spy satellite into orbit. Right now, what North Korea gets from Russia is a level of military cooperation it has not had since the Cold War. Um, since the Soviet Union, right, that is a huge, huge, um, win for Kim Jong Un. It might also be a win for Kim's nuclear weapons, even though no one knows for sure if Russia is helping him develop them. What we do know is that Kim has carried out an unprecedented number of missile launches since 2022. People call them provocations as if they're just intended to get under our skin. They're not, they're testing new systems. And astoundingly, almost all of them seem to work. These missile launches used to have a different purpose. The idea that they were always so dangerous, uh, was mistaken. The North Koreans did not want to go to war before. The whole purpose of their policy was to engage the Americans, not to go to war with them. In other words, weapons testing was kind of part of their diplomatic policy. A way to make sure South Korea, and more importantly, its superpower backer, the US, kept talking to them. That takes us back to the DMZ. It looked pretty good when these meetings were happening there a few years ago. South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un were taking steps to try and finally end the war. Because remember, the two Koreas never officially made peace. And US President Donald Trump made a surprise appearance. He also came to visit the DMZ, and was actually the first US president ever to set foot into North Korean territory. Many didn't take the meetings between the two seriously, but actually, there were clear signs that Kim Jong Un really was willing to do something, right? And something on his nuclear weapons program. So Kim may have been willing to give up a lot in return for sanctions relief. But at their summit in Hanoi, the talks collapsed. Hanoi was a terrific failure. A personal failure for Kim Jong Un. Uh, and from that point on, he began thinking how he was going to change the policy. They don't believe they can get anything from the US. I think they've given up right now the idea that sanctions will be lifted or could be lifted if they just did the right thing, right? Kim seems to have abandoned the hope for peace. And all this isn't happening in a vacuum. We see China, Russia, and North Korea working more closely together, and Iran is in the mix as well. You know, Kim Jong Un was one of the first world leaders to talk about and embrace the idea of a new Cold War. They are politically aligned with, you know, Russia and China against the West. Kim's allies, Russia and China, are back to thinking about spheres of influence and territorial ambitions. Russia is trying to take over Ukraine, and China is eyeing Taiwan. That's the context for Kim's talk about the maritime border. It could just be rhetoric, or he could be planning to take over one of these little islands. So will he really start a war? This could be a long fuse and a long-term plan, while he prepares his own people, while he he gathers together the equipment he needs, while he convinces his allies that they need to support him. I don't know where he thinks he is in this, and therefore where how close he is to pulling the trigger. There's definitely a reason, um, to a reason for concern, and a reason why we should be trying to rebuild diplomacy with the North Koreans in order to, you know, pull them back into the international community. As we've seen, at the moment, Kim doesn't really seem interested in that. Instead, he's started looking elsewhere for support. So is that enough to give him what he wants, or does he have more dangerous options?
